A three-year waiting list for subsidized housing. Fair market rents 60% higher than before the pandemic. Working couples who can’t make rent. Seniors trapped between homes they can no longer maintain and assisted living they cannot afford.

Those were among the realities described Wednesday morning at the Palmer House Apartments in Palmerton, where Lt. Gov. Austin Davis convened a roundtable of housing, banking and aging experts for the fourth stop on the Shapiro-Davis administration’s “Putting More Money Back in Your Pockets” tour.

Davis, who chairs the tour alongside Gov. Josh Shapiro, said the forum was personal. As someone who made eight unsuccessful offers before finally purchasing a home while his wife was expecting their daughter, Davis said he understands the stakes.

“We need to build more homes, plain and simple, and we need to protect vulnerable people like our seniors and low-income families who need more affordable housing, and they need it now,” Davis said.

The event drew a panel of local officials and advocates who outlined what they described as compounding failures across income levels, demographics and housing types, and who pointed to aging infrastructure, outdated zoning codes and a complex web of funding requirements as barriers to progress.

Wage and rent gap grows

Robert Nicolella, executive director of the Carbon County Housing Authority, said the financial math underlying the region’s housing crisis is stark.

He said workers typically need to earn between $25 and $35 an hour, depending on household size and composition, to afford market-rate rent in the area. For the populations his authority serves, that threshold can be unreachable.

“Female-headed households make up 72% of individuals in housing,” Nicolella said, noting that seniors and people with disabilities round out the bulk of the authority’s tenants.

Each group, he added, faces distinct but overlapping disadvantages when competing in the rental market.

Fair market rents in the region have increased 60% since before COVID-19.

“Enough said,” Nicolella said. “You can turn off the mic.”

Seniors caught in the middle

Susan Zeigler, administrator of the Carbon County Area Agency on Aging, said older adults in the county face an especially severe shortage of options.

Subsidized senior housing, such as the Palmer House itself, carries a three-year waiting list. But many seniors earn too much to qualify for subsidized units while earning far too little for assisted living, which in Carbon County runs more than $2,000 a month for a shared room.

“There’s a huge gap between living independently, with some supports, and going into a nursing home, and there’s nothing there in the middle,” Zeigler said.

She described a program called SHARE, Shared Housing and Resource Education, that the agency is piloting in Carbon County, matching seniors who have extra space with people seeking housing. In some cases, she said, rent is paid not in money but in services like lawn mowing or light housekeeping. The program is “trying to get up and going,” she said.

Zeigler also raised concerns about seniors who are so desperate for housing solutions that they become vulnerable to financial exploitation. She described a woman who sent money to a romance scammer posing as a military servicemember and ultimately lost her home.

“The older adult is desperate for housing solutions, and when they’re desperate, they’re more susceptible to fall victim to scams,” Zeigler said. “When an older adult has no good options, they accept the ones that they have. And I think we can do better for them.”

Her vision for a real solution, she said, is a senior community with small one- or two-bedroom homes, on-site medical care and a senior center where residents could gather for meals — a model she acknowledged remains a dream for now.

Workforce housing and the brain drain

Tom Campbell, director of housing initiatives for Pocono Mountains United Way and a community development official with Community Development of Poconos, said the housing shortage is no longer just a problem for the lowest-income residents. The math simply doesn’t work for working-class households.

“The person who is working downtown at the diner and their spouse who is working at the lumber yard, their combined incomes are not enough to make the rent,” Campbell said.

He said businesses looking to expand into the region have turned away because their employees have nowhere to live.

“There are businesses that have considered building here and opening offices, and they said there’s actually no place for our employees to actually live that they would want to live or can afford to live, so they go elsewhere,” Campbell said.

Campbell said all types of housing, not just affordable units, need to grow together. Higher-end housing, he argued, creates a ladder effect that benefits the whole market.

“All housing is good,” Campbell said. “We need affordable housing. Also, higher-end housing means that people can move up.”

Zoning and infrastructure

Both Campbell and Linda Christman, president of Save Carbon County, said zoning codes rooted in a previous era are a primary obstacle to diverse housing development.

Christman, who also represents the federally backed Reimagine Carbon initiative, said the region has plenty of models to learn from. She pointed to the doubles and triples built by the Palmerton Zinc Company for its workers, many of which remain occupied and desirable today. But building similar attached housing now requires navigating zoning rules that were not designed for it.

“Our ideas about zoning have to change,” Christman said. “We have to remove the zoning and permitting barriers that limit choices that are available to seniors and young people.”

She also noted that what works for seniors often works for young people such as apartment buildings with community rooms, walking paths and accessible amenities.

“Whatever housing we can create for seniors will also help young people and young families,” Christman said. “The governor’s plan includes a variety of housing, and I think that’s the key, you have to give people options. Not everyone wants to, or can afford to, live in a single-family home on a half-acre lot. That has become out of the reach of most people.”

Revitalizing what already exists

John Dowling, chairperson of the Panther Valley Blueprint Communities and a loan officer at Jim Thorpe Neighborhood Bank, said the answer to the region’s housing shortage may lie in looking inward rather than outward.

“I think we have plenty of small, older communities that have the bones and the community identities that it makes more sense to me to revitalize those communities, rather than move things out where it costs more to develop,” Dowling said.

He described watching construction costs spiral during the loan process, a project’s estimates rising by 50% in as little as three to four months as supply chain delays and inflation compound.

Dowling also warned against the complexity of layered government funding, describing a visit to a mixed-use redevelopment project in Berwick where a colleague had mapped every funding stream and deadline on an office whiteboard.

“It should be easy, it shouldn’t be prohibitive, and projects shouldn’t need a million variances to come to fruition,” Dowling said of both zoning and funding requirements.

‘Take off the red and blue jerseys’

Davis outlined what the administration’s Housing Action Plan aims to accomplish: increasing and preserving housing supply, expanding access and opportunity, strengthening pathways to housing stability, lowering costs and speeding up development, and improving coordination and accountability.

He said the political will exists to act across party lines.

“This is an issue where folks want us to take off our red jerseys and our blue jerseys and to put on the Pennsylvania jersey,” Davis said. “Somebody has to take the first step, and we did that by putting forward the plan.”

Davis said he expects debate over specifics when budget negotiations begin in June but expressed optimism that housing is one area where a divided government can find common ground.

Officials input

State Rep. Doyle Heffley, a Republican, said affordability is a major concern for Pennsylvania families and urged the current administration to focus on bringing energy prices down.

“Pennsylvania is one of the largest energy producers in the country, yet the governor and lieutenant governor have failed to adopt policies that increase supply,” Heffley said. “ As a result, much of the energy we produce goes to neighboring states, and Pennsylvanians are penalized by essentially subsidizing energy costs for residents in New Jersey, Maryland and surrounding states.”

Heffley said he would value, “a conversation on practical steps we can take to reduce costs for all Pennsylvania families.

“If we want to talk about affordability in housing, the crisis in our Commonwealth is not caused by policies in Washington,” he added. “It is caused by decisions made here in Pennsylvania.”

Carbon County Commissioner Rocky Ahner, a Democrat, said homes selling for more than they are worth is contributing to the housing crisis.

“If a home sells for twice what it is worth, the new owner appeals the tax and it is usually reduced, yet that owner increases rent based on the purchase price,” Ahner said. “Now the rent goes from $750 to $1,200 and we can’t figure out why we don’t have affordable housing. Paying property tax on the purchased price would have high bidding investors thinking differently.”